Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis by Peter Fonagy

Author:Peter Fonagy [Fonagy, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-59051-460-3
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2001-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

10

The Interpersonal-Relational Approach: From Sullivan to Mitchell

The most rapidly evolving theoretical orientation within psychoanalysis of the last decade of the twentieth century (and perhaps the first decade of the twenty-first) is the so-called relational or intersubjective approach. Many major figures are contributing to this orientation. Its identifying tenet is perhaps the assumption that the psychoanalytic encounter is co-constructed between two active participants with the subjectivities of both patient and analyst contributing to generate the shape and substance of the dialogue that emerges. There are a great number of brilliant major contributors more or less committed to relational/intersubjective views, including Ogden (1994), McLaughlin (1991), Hoffman (1994), Renik (1993), and Bromberg (1998), to name just a few in this most fertile of fields (other major contributors working within this framework include Daniel Stern, Jay Greenberg, Lewis Aron, Stuart Pizer, and Stephen Mitchell). Their views are all somewhat different and a definitive intersubjective-relational view has yet to emerge. Having reviewed interpersonal approaches in the early 1980s, Merton Gill was said to have come to a conclusion analogous to Ghent’s witty description of a psychoanalytic political grouping that agreed to affiliate under a common designation and then avoided defining the often very different concepts that each had in mind when using a term (Mitchell 1996). Stephen Mitchell has been singled out for discussion here because the links between his views and those of attachment theory show the greatest overlap and appear most productive in their convergence.

The key ideas of the interpersonal school form the foundations of the relational-intersubjective approach. The major classical contributors include Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Clara Thompson. Both Sullivan and Thompson were, in the 1930s, already demonstrating how to treat schizophrenic young men and schizoid young women patients from the perspective of interpersonal relations, operationist and humanist, without the libido metaphor. Sullivan never even tried to become a psychoanalyst, although acknowledged indebtedness to Freud. It was probably Clara Thompson, originally a training analyst in the New York Psychoanalytic, who blended together Sullivan’s interpersonal psychiatry with Eric Fromm’s humanistic psychoanalysis and Ferenczi’s clinical and technical discoveries to generate an interpersonal approach to psychoanalysis (Thompson 1964). Among contemporary interpersonal writers, perhaps Benjamin Wolstein’s (1977, 1994) and Edgar Levenson’s (1983, 1990) work should be mentioned.

One of the key innovations of the interpersonalists’ approach is their replacement of the classic model of the psychoanalyst as observer without memory or desire (analyst as outside) with a model of the analyst as participant in a shared activity (analyst as inside). They supplement or replace notions of objective truth with subjectivity; the intrapsychic with the intersubjective; fantasy (poetics) with pragmatics (descriptions of experience or of events); content interpretations with observation of process; the concepts of truth and distortion with perspectivism; conceptions of internal sameness within people with external (and therefore, implicitly, internal) uniqueness; the prevalence of strong theory with the virtue of trying to denude oneself of theoretical bias; and countertransference-as-feeling with countertransference-as-enactment. In the meantime an influential stream of the American psychoanalytic establishment

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